Facebook has acquired UK start-up Surreal Vision, founded by three PhD students at Imperial College London, to combine it with its Oculus VR subsidiary. Surreal Vision specialises in real-time 3D scene reconstruction for use in Virtual Reality software. The founders, Richard Newcombe, Steven Lovegrove and Renato Salas-Moreno, will join the Oculus research team in Redmond, Washington.
They wrote in an Oculus blog post that the technologies they are working on "will lead to VR and AR systems that can be used in any condition, day or night, indoors or outdoors. They will open the door to true telepresence, where people can visit anyone, anywhere." The first commercial model of Facebook's Oculus Rift VR headset is due to go on sale in the first quarter of 2016, while the smartphone-based Gear VR headset was released by Samsung and Oculus earlier this year.
